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Rovio Denies Knowledge of NSA Access, Angry Birds Website Defaced Anyway
Nerval's Lobster writes "Rovio Entertainment, the software company behind Angry Birds, denies that it knowingly shares data with the NSA, Britain's GCHQ, or any other national intelligence agency. But that didn't stop hackers from briefly defacing the Angry Birds website with an NSA logo and the title
'Spying Birds.' Rovio's troubles began with a New York Times article that suggested the NSA and GCHQ had installed backdoors in popular apps such as Angry Birds, allowing the agencies to siphon up enormous amounts of user data. The Times drew its information from government whistleblower Edward Snowden, who has leaked hundreds of pages of top-secret documents related to NSA activities over the past few months. 'The alleged surveillance may be conducted through third party advertising networks used by millions of commercial web sites and mobile applications across all industries,' Rovio wrote in a statement on its website. 'If advertising networks are indeed targeted, it would appear that no Internet-enabled device that visits ad-enabled web sites or uses ad-enabled applications is immune to such surveillance.' The company pledged to evaluate its relationships with those ad networks. The controversy is unlikely to dampen enthusiasm for the Angry Birds franchise, which has enjoyed hundreds of millions of downloads across a multitude of platforms. It could, however, add momentum to continuing discussions about the NSA's reach into peoples' lives."
Companies like Google, Microsoft, Rovio Entertainment, Facebook, and others remind me of that Clapper idiot.
So which is it? Do the NSA have my Angry Birds high score or don't they?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
We already saw Saruman using bird for spying in LOTR, but this warning wasn't enough...
It always bothers me when I see comments like "But that didn't stop hackers from briefly defacing the Angry Birds website with an NSA logo and the title 'Spying Birds.' ".
Did they install the backdoor software knowingly? Does it even have it, or is Snowden's reports wrong? Do they deserve some level of punishment at all? These hackers do not know, but they take some comment from the NYT and use that as justification to target someone for punishment. This is the exact reason we have a legal system and outlaw vigilantism; while our legal system is annoyingly frustrating, this kind of vigilante anarchy is not better.
Can't wait for Angry Birds to Die!
I know! Sometimes they get stuck on a bouncy surface and just linger on and on...it gets really annoying.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
It seems that the Angry Birds iPhone covers, air fresheners, chew toys, fruit snacks, T-shirts, and cock rings sold at the local drug store have all been replaced by Duck Dynasty variants of the same. I took that to mean that nobody cared about Angry Birds any more.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Did Rovio use a system already identified as being fraught with privacy concerns? Yes. And as long as it made them money, they didn't pay more than lip service to the issues (just like all the other companies built on Google's system - so don't I'm raging on just Rovio).
It has long been established legal reasoning that people benefiting from an illegality are complicit in that illegality. I consider it hypocritical for Rovio or any other developer to simply say, "Hey, it wasn't us, we just used and profited from the system." Rovio made a choice, at the least they can stand up and show some integrity and tell us they knew this system was bad but they were more interested in the money. At least then I can respect them for being forthright. As it is though, they're as dirty as the rest and liars to boot.